Monday, December 3, 2012

In my last post, I showed how you could implement the Int construction over resumptions, to derive a higher-order programming language from a first-order one. However, this is not yet a practical tool. The code I gave presented the language as a bunch of combinators, which rapidly get quite painful to write serious programs. Most of us prefer the lambda calculus to SKI combinators for good reason --- programs with variables and binders are much easier to read, since the code that actually does work in not obscured in a rat's nest of plumbing combinators that route data from one combinator to another.

I had hoped to rectify that in this post, by showing how to compile the linear lambda calculus into combinator terms. But when I started
to write it, I realized that I needed to write a warmup post first, which would introduce the basic ideas in a simpler setting. So I'll defer compiling linear types for a little while, and show how to embed total functional programming into OCaml.